Method: Stop posts to the blog, publish no articles and make no updates to the website for four weeks.

Observation: Traffic to the site was reduced by sixty percent.

Conclusion: Inbound strategy was driving traffic to the website.

The recovery plan is in place and it has taken over six weeks to recover the level of traffic. The blog posting schedule is back in place and articles are being written and submitted.

Every time someone challenges the effectiveness of an online communications strategy, the simple way to silence doubters is to conduct your own Scary Experiment and see what happens. This is a dramatic way to prove that a strategy works, it takes a lot of courage but it works.